French film theorist André Bazin was fascinated by films in which humans and animals are framed together, especially in circumstances in which the presence of one signals the endangerment of the other. By putting Bazin and two films he admired (Kon Tiki and Umberto D) in conversation with Jacques Derrida's writing on the animal and Walter Benjamin's infrahuman optics, this article argues that Bazin's commitments to cinematic realism and the recurrence in his writing of human/animal propinquity signal a distinctly posthumanist ethics. Jacques Perrin's Winged Migration realizes Bazin's interest in a cinema that de-centers and even absents the human. It may also be a film that answers Derrida's call that we not just look at animals, but feel ourselves seen by them.

Inhospitable World explores the connection between cinema and artificial weather, climates, and even planets in or on which hospitality and survival are at stake. Cinema’s dominant mode of aesthetic world-making is often at odds with the very real human world it is meant to simulate. The chapters in this book take the reader to a scene—the mise-en-scène—where human world-making is undone by the force of human activity, whether it is explicitly for the sake of making a film, or for practicing war and nuclear science, or for the purpose of addressing climate change in ways that exacerbate its already inhospitable effects. The episodes in this book emphasize our always unnatural and unwelcoming environment as a matter of production, a willed and wanted milieu, however harmful, that is inseparable from but also made perceivable through film. While no one film or set of films adds up to a totalizing explanation of climate change, cinema enables us to glimpse anthropogenic environments as both an accidental effect of human activity and a matter of design. Chapters on Buster Keaton, American atomic test films, film noir, the art of China’s Three Gorges Dam, and films of early Antarctic exploration trace parallel histories of film and location design that spell out the ambitions, sensations, and narratives of the Anthropocene, especially as it consolidates into the Great Acceleration starting in 1945.

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Both the Germans and their American occupiers understood that films were supposed to support a democratic culture and worldview during the occupation following the Second World War. This essay explores how democratic culture comes to be defined at mid-century through choice, and how two films that played in the Western Zones, Der Apfel ist ab (1948) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), take up choice as a formal aesthetic closely tied to a fraught democratic experience. Best Years, praised by German critics as a realistic portrait of American life, also adopts what the film critic André Bazin calls a democratic and liberal film style of deep focus compositions and shots of long duration that allow the spectator to choose what to look at in the frame. Yet, as even Bazin notes, this choice is slyly coercive. Der Apfel was a critical failure and thematises indecision within the narrative. In contrast to Best Years, it turns the optics of choice into vertiginous confusion in which there are no good choices. This essay argues that the democratic refusal in Der Apfel ist ab is an apt critique of 'democracy as choice', and that the film opens up new horizons of political invention. Die Deutschen und ihre amerikanischen Besatzer wussten gleichermaßen, dass Filme während der Besatzungszeit eine demokratische Kultur und Weltanschauung hervorbringen und unterstützen sollten. Dieser Artikel erörtert, wie die demokratische Kultur Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts als Wahl definiert wurde, und wie zwei in den Westzonen gespielte Filme, Der Apfel ist ab (1948) und The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), mit dem Topos der Wahl umgehen, das als formaleÄsthetik eng mit einer schwierigen demokratischen Erfahrung verbunden ist. Best Years, von deutschen Kritikern als realistisches Portrait amerikanischen Lebens gelobt, ist außerdem ein Beispiel des vom Kritiker André Bazin sogenannten demokratischen und liberalen Filmstils mit Kompositionen aus tiefem Fokus und Aufnahmen von langer Dauer, die es dem Zuschauer selbstüberlassen, worauf er sein Augenmerk richtet. Jedoch, wie sogar Bazin notierte, ist diese Wahl auf listige Weise zwingend. Der Apfel war ein kritischer Misserfolg und thematisiert die Unentschlossenheit innerhalb der Handlung. Im Gegensatz zu Best Years verwandelt dieser Film die Optik der Wahl in schwindelerregende Verwirrung, in der es letztendlich keine gute Wahl gibt. Dieser Artikel behauptet, dass die demokratische Verweigerung in Der Apfel eine treffende Kritik der Vorstellung von ʻDemokratie als Wahlʼ darstellt, und dass der Film neue Horizonte politischer Schöpfungskraft eröffnet.